DOWNTOWN LA
Old Flames In The Bowers
Cathy Akers, Lela Shahrzad Welch, and Chris Ulivo
December 6, 2025 - January 31, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, December 6, 6-9pm
Chris Ulivo.
Another Trans-Zonal Incident. 2025. Egg tempera on panel. 36 ¾” x 24 ¾”.
Grief-broken stranger, rest thee underneath
These shady bowers; if wine can make thee glad,
Enter this pleasant place, and drink thy fill.
– from The Sháh Námeh by Hakīm Abol-Qāsem Firdawsī Ṭūsī
The 2000 Sydney Olympics beautifully embodied Australian egalitarianism and a sort of rough play. I was 22 at the time. At some point while watching, the devastating revelation that I would never be an Olympian hit me. It should not have been a surprise – I was 300 lbs and had no interest in athletics, but it was my first realization that time flows ruthlessly in one direction. Luckily, CBS played reruns of Survivor opposite the games. A national phenomena, a contra-olympics, where you could watch maladapted young people wallow in a jungle, eat fish entrails, and backstab each other for money.
Where am I going with this? The advent of Survivor is also when I started my ongoing mental exercise of "team building." I like to construct imaginary teams to solve interesting or thorny problems. Want to sink Jeff Bezos’ yacht? Send in one high-end bartender with carpentry experience, one retired Navy ER nurse, and one exquisitely bitter classical pianist.1
Curatorial practices are a notable version of this game. Having the opportunity to organize a three-person show at Track 16, I chose a hypothetical prompt on whic
– Chris Ulivo
1: More examples available upon request.
Lela Shahrzad Welch.
threadbare and held so long. 2025. Powder coated steel, aluminum, MDF, resin, FGR-95. 53 x 29 x 10”.
In the shadow of our everyday reality are the shadows of stories, our uncertain histories, and alternative timelines. Reimagining our new present springing from altered choices in the past rubs against the weight of destiny – of the impossibility of anything being different. Maybe in the quantum world a particle can go back in time and tell its partner how to change and when, but either way we live in the classical world where most of the past and all the future is hidden. Akers, Welch, and Ulivo each passionately grapple with past and future.
Cathy Akers’ artistic practice has long focused on utopian societies. Through a lens of fantasy and infused with a sense of the absurd, Akers’ ceramic sculptures imagine a female-centric world informed both by classics of modern utopian feminist literature and her ongoing research into modern attempts at communal living.
Drawing on a history of assemblage, textiles, and storytelling, Lela Shahrzad Welch – acting as a seeker of a culture rather than a participant in it – uses metal and found objects to address the lack of a family or personal archive. Inspired by traditional Persian imagery and folklore, Welch creates sculptural works that consider the roles and effects of translation and mythopoeia.
Chris Ulivo is a fantasist, painting stories that leap out of speculative histories. His earnest –often hapless – surrogates humbly cultivate his egg tempera landscapes to form the essential relationships of their illusory world – we are working together, learning, acting. In these rooted fantasies, he strives “for vitality and believability in each painting no matter how improbable or ridiculous the narrative.”
